philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and
philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There
is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore
is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive
the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or
is nothing without it."[138]

But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which he would
have been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known
it, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much
less read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his
work and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to
passages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of
these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere
got his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous passage in
HENRY V.,[139] in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely
framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato's
REPUBLIC and Cicero's DE REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide
with M. Stapfer[140] that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but
got his suggestion from some English translation or citation.

In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere,
as well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general
as a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of
others; and among the books in his own language which we know him to
have read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back
to Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most important and the most
potential for suggestion and provocation.

IV.

To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for
Shakspere, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the
positive facts of his life and circumstances--a thing made difficult for
us in England through the transcendental direction given to our
Shakspere lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit,
Coleridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, as a mind of
unapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us
that it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal
individuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we
read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of
Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations